9th June

The strong wind that set in earlier in the week is taking its time to die away, with today's blustery conditions again severely impacting on land coverage. The only worthwhile reports were of small numbers of Manx Shearwaters, a Great Northern Diver and a Great Skua through off the Bill.

And to end on something completely different, we now have a static bat detector deployed at the Bill, with the principle intention of maybe tapping into some migrant bat activity. We're total novices when it comes to anything to do with bats so we're heavily reliant on the expert help of Adrian Bicker, who initiated the project in the first place. Adrian's still having to spend a lot of time with us going through the sound files generated by the detector and on today's visit he identified several passes on a night earlier this month by a Greater Horseshoe Bat:

We'll give a fuller rundown on findings in due course, but these were the first detections of a Greater Horseshoe since we got going back in April. We do have occasional previous records of Greater Horseshoe seen in various circumstances and it'll interesting to discover whether the species crops up more frequently now that sampling's taking place every night.